Mike,
Let's get some terminology straight.
An avatar is the little picture that appears in the upper left hand corner of each of your posts, just below your member name. Its limited in size to 200 pixels by 200 pixels. This is the picture of you standing next to your beautifu white Pantera, in my case its the cowboy riding the bronco. Avatars are added to your "profile" via the "Edit Profile" page, in your "Personal Zone".
To share other pictures with DTIC members, you would choose the appropriate forum, and navigate to the forum content page, the page that lists all the most recent topics in that one forum. Along the top of that forum is a tool bar that has tabs reading: "Go", "New", "Find", "Notify", "Tools".Place your cursor on the "New" tab and left click, and a drop down menu will give you the choices of a new: Discussion, Private Message or Photo Album. Choose either discussion or photo album. A discussion is best for one or two pictures, or for starting a topic that others may want to add to themselves. A photo album is best for loading many pictures at once, and for keeping the pictures more personal.
Pictures loaded this way are limited to 200 KB per picture. I advise people to keep the pictures to a width of 700 pixels or less, so they will fit on everybody's computer screen.
Moving a picture file saved on your computer to the forum is called an upload. Depending on your camera settings, you may need to shrink the size of your photos before uploading them. Some file types compress the picture data which decreases number of "bytes" for a given picture size. JPEG or JPG is the most common type of compressed photo file. It is almost a necessity to convert photos to JPEG format in order to upload them, because of the limit I have set for file size (200 KB). Files can be converted from one file type to another by using the top tool bar on your computer and selecting "file" - "save as".
Does that help at all?
cowboy from hell